Unified IT: Slash the Time Spent on Routine ITSM Tasks

American news anchor Brian Williams, who hosts MSNBC’s nightly program The 11th Hour, frequently acknowledges the quality of the reporting produced by guests on his program. I’d like to think he’d feel the same about an Ivanti ROI white paper authored by analyst Tammy Klein of Hobson & Company titled The Business Case for Unified IT: Automated IT Service and Unified Endpoint Management Solution.

It summarizes the research findings based on Hobson & Company interviews with Directors and Managers of IT Operations, Services Management, Systems Engineering, Deployment, and Delivery and Support at a number of U.S. and international organizations. The bulk of the paper’s content supports Klein’s claim early on that the value of an automated, unified ITSM and UEM solution is immediate and demonstrable.

Operational Efficiencies, Reduced IT Costs, and Improved Service Quality and Compliance

Klein writes that a sample organization with 10,000 employees, 3,000 service requests a month, 40 hours a week spent managing changes, and 25 application/upgrade deployments per year can experience $1.5 million in savings from maximizing operational efficiencies and reduced IT costs alone. She adds that through improved service quality and compliance, annual benefits can be as much as $2.3 million.

For the purposes of this blog post, let’s latch onto the topic of “maximizing operational efficiencies,” which in the world of ITSM and UEM frequently boils down to reducing:

The time spent on routine tasks

The number of service requests into the group

The time spent collecting call details

The time spent creating software packages

The time spent on application deployments

Ticket-Status Time Drain: 10 to 15 Minutes per Ticket across Thousands of Tickets per Month

It’s no secret that managing processes manually, or across a number of disparate systems, devours a lot of time. Notifying end users when incident report tickets have been opened and closed, taking service requests via phone calls, answering status calls from end users, creating new software packages, and managing application and upgrade deployments drain time and human energy.

Klein writes, “Many of those interviewed noted that it used to take a significant amount of administrative time just to keep end users updated on the status of their tickets, taking as much as 10 to 15 minutes per ticket, across thousands of tickets per month. In addition, time spent entering data between the IT Service and Unified Endpoint Management systems would require a number of manual steps and substantial time. These manual steps were also prone to errors. Those interviewed reported that as many as one percent to three percent of tickets would get lost or misplaced each month when being transferred to different departments for resolution, requiring an average of an hour each to be recovered.”

Here’s an at-a-glance snapshot of the value gained by maximizing operational efficiencies:

Key Source of Value: Maximize Operational Efficiencies

Achievements of the

Sample Organization

Annual Productivity-improvement ROI

Testimonial

1. Reduce time spent on routine tasks.

Time spent updating end users on ticket status cut by 95%.

$232,900

Reduced time per call from five to six minutes each down to two to three minutes, and increased the number of calls handled per agent from an average of 20 a day to 50 a day.

– IT Service Manager

2. Reduce the number of service requests into the IT group.

Number of service requests and the time-per-service request cut by 10%.

$296,200

It once took from five to 10 minutes per ticket to email updates to end users across thousands of tickets a month. This time has been reduced to essentially zero.

– IT Operations Manager

3. Reduce time spent collecting call details.

Time spent collecting call details cut by 40%.

$108,000

Prior to Ivanti, 60 percent to 70 percent of all calls were service requests that could take five to 10 minutes each to answer and 15 to 20 days to complete.

– IT Service Manager

4. Reduce time spent creating software packages.

Time needed to build packages cut by 85% per package.

$120,000

Reduced from as much as a day

down to about an hour the time needed to build each software package.

– Deployment Officer

5. Reduce time spent on application deployments.

Time devoted to application deployments cut by 95% per machine.

$465,800

Able to save 20 minutes per machine, per upgrade, over as many as 10 upgrades a year across 500+ machines each time.

– Network Manager

The fact is, organizations that unify IT to optimize services are better able to control costs and improve service levels. Carve out some time to read the ROI white paper. You might also find this infographic useful: